MORE than 200 operations cancelled, scores of emergency patients waiting half-an-hour for a bed and a large deficit – that is the tale of woe facing bosses at Basingtoke hospital.

Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which runs Basingstoke, Winchester and Andover hospitals, cancelled 203 planned operations in January because of lack of bed space.

During the first month of the year, 78 patients were left waiting for 30 minutes or more for a bed after arriving by ambulance, and 13 were left waiting for more than one hour. One patient was left waiting for more than 12 hours.

There have been financial penalties and repercussions to cancelling operations and missing clinical targets, which have contributed to the trust slipping £4.1million into the red.

In January, 86 per cent of patients spent under four hours in the emergency department (ED), compared to the national target of 95 per cent.

The trust has failed to hit this target for the second consecutive quarter. A third consecutive quarter would usually trigger the intervention of NHS watchdog Monitor, but bosses are hoping the fact there are numerous trusts in far worse positions will spare them.

As previously reported in The Gazette, the hospital is dealing with high numbers of people coming into the ED – currently an increase of more than 10 per cent on last year – while beds are being blocked by patients who cannot be discharged.

In her latest operational update to the trust’s board of directors, chief executive of HHFT Mary Edwards said that the reasons for the failure to hit the four-hour waiting time target were “well-rehearsed”.

She said: “The problem in meeting this target is due to a number of factors including additional ED attendances, however more recently this has reduced.

“The major variable seems to be the difficulty in enabling adequate numbers of medical inpatients to be discharged when compared to the number we normally admit via our emergency departments.

“Our overall measure for ‘length of stay’ has increased by two days, indicating that more patients are staying longer than the previous norm.

“Our partners in community and social care are trying hard to facilitate faster discharges for patients but they are also hindered by a lack of nursing home placements or shortages of care staff for home packages of care.”

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